The Witching Elm by C.N. Crawford and narrated by Laurel Schroeder is a fantasy book for teens but adults will enjoy it too! Plenty of drama, suspenseful tension, mysteries, amazing magic and spells, ghosts, Creatures from the dead, shape shifting and so much more! This is a fantasy readers delight! Just about everything is in here and it is done wonderfully! The opening scene had me hooked as the main character changes from a crow to a boy! Yep! That got my attention!
The narration is fabulous! She is able to perform all the voices, emotions, and even the creatures like ghosts to make you feel like they are ghosts! Great job! ( )

I love books about witchcraft, sorcerers, witches, Salem all of it... I love it. I have even since I could remember and this book surely delivers on all of that in a wonderful dark way. I received this book for the blog tour and waited until the last minute to read it, but that was fine because I blew through it. The plot was strong, quick, and interesting. It kept me engaged at every turn and the characters were just as fun.

In this story we meet Toby, who is a teen sorcerer from a world that exists on another plane near Boston, and he has been sent to Boston for protection from an evil sorcerer who is killing just about everyone. This dark magic, demons, and evil sorcerers permeate the book from the first page, making the story almost fly by as you read to keep up with Toby. While in Boston, Toby attends a boarding school and meets a bunch of other teens who learn about who he is and decide to help him on his mission to get home and save the others. This leads to everything you would expect, more danger, more crazy things happening, and more excitement and point of views to read from.

The only thing that I can say in a critical manner is that, Toby is odd. Obviously he is from another world but I think that his point of view is written a little younger than the others in the book - it may be that since he is from elsewhere there is a culture/time barrier or something, but I always felt while reading his sections (although some of the best and most interesting) that the story was about a much younger teen, and he is supposed to be 17.

Despite this, the story is pretty epic, there are secret societies, secret passages in the school, old legends, and the whole this is interspersed with history from the Boston area - it made for a wonderful book. I am a sucker for a dark fantasy I guess, but I really enjoyed this book. ( )